Article content I’ve come across many a chef who has pivoted from other careers — engineering, accounting, marketing, art, biology, law, medicine — to do what they really wanted to do, which was cook. Vancouver writer and novelist Timothy Taylor was a pivoter. He began his working life as an MBA in the high net income world of banking before aborting that mission to, not cook, but the next best thing — immerse himself in writing about it.
Spoiler alert! He succeeds. In his debut 2001 novel, Stanley Park, nominated for the prestigious Giller Prize, the protagonist is a chef, struggling to hold onto his restaurant while navigating a life that includes an eccentric anthropologist father. Along with Stanley Park and many food-related magazine articles, Taylor wrote Foodville: Biting Dispatches from a Food-Obsessed City — essays about culinary experiences and culture.
In much of his work, he’s been drone-like, circling and zeroing in on food. His recently published novel, The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, takes a deeper, confident dive into the culture of chefs, cooking, and restaurants. In this go-round, Taylor blends contemporary issues of abuse and toxic behaviours in restaurants with his impressive knowledge of cooking, cuisines and the opera of running restaurants.
All through it, you intermittently salivate as he talks food. Cockles and clams cooked in sweet Barsac wine. Discs of aspic suspended with spider crabmeat and dill flower.
Thrushes on skewers, served wit.
